There are three types of bicycles: There’s the kind of bike built for riding on the roads, there’s the kind of bike built for riding on the trails, and there’s the kind of bike built for storing in my garage.

When my friend Joel offered to let me ride with his “Morning Road Bike Club,” I very enthusiastically declined. I explained to him that there is just something offensive to me about the word “morning.” Besides, owning my kind of bicycle means that its tires are flat and also I haven’t even seen the thing since 1997. It’s buried under all the stuff that my children have lent me to store in my garage so that I won’t have to go through the hassle of parking my car in there.

Joel said he could lend me everything I needed and that, once I tried the sport, I would be hooked.

“Hooked” is a term that comes from the act of impaling a fish in its lip and yanking it out of the water. I had to agree that this was the only way I would get out of bed to ride a bicycle.

Joel can be pretty persuasive, though, especially when he mentions that he travels a lot and will need someone to use his season baseball tickets and usually “just gives them to the guys in the Morning Road Bike Club.” I decided I could probably get my body out of bed at sunrise if I explained to it that I would be feeding it plenty of beer and hot dogs at a future baseball game.

Joel loaned me a shiny, multicolored bike-riding outfit that looked like he had stolen it from the Justice League of America. Road bikers wear bright outfits like this so that they are easier to see and laugh at. The shorts were made of spandex, a fabric with a stretch tolerance of 300 percent. By my calculation, I was at 299, meaning if I ate anything larger than a peanut my shorts would explode off my body. So tightly was I gripped by this girdle, all the fat from my belly button to my knees was forced upward like a tube of toothpaste. My legs are scrawny to begin with — in this getup, I looked like a pregnant stork.

He also lent me a helmet so lightweight it felt like it would protect me about as well as a paper bag. I didn’t like the idea that I would be needing such a thing. “Why don’t we just agree that I’ll do whatever it takes not to fall on my head, including, if necessary, remaining a safe distance from the bicycle?” I proposed to Joel.

“Ready for your first ride?” Joel enthused.

“I’m more ready for my last bike ride,” I countered. “What row did you say your seats are in?”

Joel laughed as if it was funny that someone would pretend to bike for baseball tickets instead of the sheer joy of spending an hour hunched over a machine made obsolete by the invention of internal combustion.

The pedals of the bike had been replaced with two hostile prongs that clipped to my shoes with an evil snap, holding my feet hostage. This ensures that, once the biker is pedaling fast enough, his legs will be ripped off at the knees.

It turns out there are two types of road bikers: bikers who are faster than me, and me. And you can imagine my horror when, after 10 minutes of cycling, we rode right past a doughnut shop.

You can’t ride past a doughnut shop without stopping — it defies the whole point of the place. I swung into the parking lot, came to a stop and, because my feet were clipped in, fell over like a dead tree. Luckily, I was wearing the helmet on my head, so the only thing I hurt was everything else.

Turns out, if you lie pinned under a bicycle long enough, doughnut-shop employees will bring you cinnamon rolls. But Joel seemed disappointed to find me sprawled there as if modeling for a chalk outline.

While network affiliates battle for precious slivers of attention and advertising dollars, digital distractions multiply, which has led to an overall decline in local TV-news viewership, according to a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center.